At Tuesday’s White House press briefing, reporters had plenty of questions about Donald Trump’s declaration that he was prepared to kill “a whole civilization.” The president’s top spokesperson, however, who had plenty of time to prepare for the obvious line of inquiry, didn’t seem eager to talk about it.

“I understand the questions about the president’s rhetoric,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt told one reporter. “But what the president cares most about is results.”

It wasn’t much of a response, in part because genocidal wartime threats from a sitting American president shouldn’t be shrugged off as trivial, and in part because the administration’s focus on “results” leads to a debate the White House would be better off avoiding.

Nevertheless, Leavitt wasn’t alone. The same morning, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the U.S. military “achieved every single objective … exactly as laid out from day one.” Late Tuesday afternoon, as Trump announced an apparent ceasefire in the war in Iran, he published an item to his social media platform in which he said the United States has “already met and exceeded all Military objectives.”

If that were true, it might be a potent talking point for the Republican administration. But I remain stuck on what Americans were told on Feb. 28, when Trump announced the start of the U.S. offensive in a prerecorded video filmed at his glorified country club in Florida, and he presented the public with five objectives:

• Destroy Iran’s missiles and missile industry
• Annihilate the Iranian navy
• Sever the ties between Tehran and its proxies in the Middle East
• Prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon
• Create the conditions necessary for regime change

Iran’s navy has certainly been decimated, but the other four objectives — the ones outlined on, to borrow Hegseth’s phrasing, “day one” — have plainly not been met.

Over time, officials such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio quietly amended the administration’s list, adding fresh objectives, but as things stand, those goals also haven’t been met.

On March 9, Rubio said the U.S. offensive intended to “destroy” Iran’s ability to launch missiles, while on March 30 he said the U.S. was looking for “the severe diminishing of their missile launching capability.” The shift hinted at the fact that the administration couldn’t achieve its own objective, and as the tenuous ceasefire begins, roughly a third of Iran’s missile arsenal appears to remain intact.

Assorted other objectives have been floated — Trump talked about seizing Iranian oil after briefly arguing that he was looking for an “unconditional surrender” from Tehran — but there are no check marks alongside these goals, either.

Maybe Leavitt is right, and results matter more than rhetoric. But when it comes to the war in Iran, the White House should probably try to avoid meaningful discussions about both.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

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